It’s all in a game
‘Pacman’, ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ – all familiar names from the end of the 20th Century. They and many other video games have filled the leisure time (and sometimes study time!) of many a young student.
Over the years, video and computer games have become more and more complex and in some countries have even become a spectator sport, with tens of thousands of people filling sporting arenas to watch teams compete on giant video screens!
But are video games just a bit of fun, or is there a bit more to them than that and what can they teach us about our approach to our own work?
Imagining your game
As with any creative pursuit, imagination is key in producing a compelling video game that will catch a player’s attention from start to finish. But that also requires a vision of how a storyline will develop, the important intermediate markers and any twists in the plot along the way.
Unless you’re working in a creative industry, using your imagination isn’t something that is usually consciously thought about in work. However, having a storyline in mind for anything that you do can really help to provide greater focus and impetus to any piece of work, because it allows you to visualise how what you’re going to do will fit together and what key building blocks you’ll need to realise that.
What’s your concept?
No great computer game would ever be created without an initial concept behind it. Having a concept in mind creates a platform from which video game developers can work, taking a simple idea and turning it into an end product.
But for anyone providing goods or services, having a compelling concept behind a product is also hugely important, because it provides the foundation from which products can be developed that are both useful and fit for market. (This is becoming more and more important in the age of greater connectivity where user experience is paramount.)
Show me the prototype
Taking a concept through to final product takes many stages, but in order to understand whether a concept has any real legs, computer game developers may develop a simple prototype to test whether or not their initial idea can be worked upon.
As with any product, testing a prototype and getting user feedback is crucial in establishing whether the idea in its present form, is something that people will eventually be willing to use and pay for.
In a way, the approach that video game developers take teaches us not to get too far ahead of our own ideas too quickly and to avoid the temptation of starting to work on developing features, before the basic prototype works.
Design away
Once a computer game has a strong concept behind it and a working prototype, adding through design starts to build on the initial imaginative idea by organically building layers to it. Eventually, once all layers are added, the game starts to take the shape of something closer to the end product for final testing.
Designing products in other industries requires a similar approach, but that too requires sticking close to the concept, prototype and the initial idea and building from them.
The key difficulty in design stage of any product is deviating from the initial idea. There can be a temptation to ‘get to market’ quickly in the quest to get something out there, but in doing so, taking short cuts or looking for quick wins can take the shine off a strong underlying idea and detract from the quality and/or usability of the end product.
For computer game designers, sticking to the original idea can be less of a problem, as they often stay in close-knit teams who all understand the idea and concept behind the game being developed. However, in other industries, if products are developed by people working in different silos, the risk of deviating from the underlying idea increases and eventually, you could find yourself working on something that can no longer be sense-checked against the base idea.
Being a storyteller
As with any creative pursuit, the imagination, thought and planning that goes into a modern video game is huge.
Taking an idea from concept through to finished product requires a firm vision of not only the storyline, but many variations of it along the way. As the same player attempts to pass through different stages of a game, a storyline will often take deviations that prevent a player from advancing until he/she works out how to work through that particular problem.
One of the challenges of working in any walk of life is the ability to adapt to different and sometimes difficult circumstances quickly. The ‘storyline’ that we expect may also take a number of unexpected twists and turns that we need to work through, or we become stuck on the same level.
However, if like the computer game developer, you start to imagine a number of potential scenarios for the work that your are doing, it can make completing a piece of work easier, because your vision of the complete storyline remains in tact, despite being confronted with deviations along the way.
Which game will you choose?
So irrespective of whether you’re a Super Mario or prefer to play amongst the Asteroids, the way that you choose, build and play your own video game matters.
In any walk of life, it is easy to be distracted and for great little gems of ideas to be lost by losing the thread to a story. But by staying true to your idea or vision of something from conception to end product, whether a computer game, a piece of work or creating your own products, you will always maintain the honesty and integrity of your original idea and make it more valuable for all in the long run.
